So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

**noob alert**
Hi all, I'm new to this community. I found it out couple of days back while downloading some apps on play store. And I don't know how much time have I spent here since then... Damm, I've an interview after 2 days.

My query is, I am stuck/confused. I have so many ToDos. ToDos to learn new things, from UI to other langs to machine learning to database to etc etc. And I keep on postponing it because I can't decide which way to go first. There is so much fuzz about BigData/AI which sounds cool. Sometimes I want to build UI for my imaginary idea, then somebody says a man must learn linux and DB. Top of that I'm preparing for interviews, so I think I should get a job first and then start learning. But when I get a job, I get *busy* with job. It feels like Captain America, all he does is official work. I sometimes feel like trying open source coding, but quit the idea because I get scared or overwhelmed by imagining the big community behind it and I won't be able to make a difference or I might get bashed by others as I get bashed in StackOverFlow :-(
I'm unable to get help from friends/family/colleagues, not because they are bad. It's just they don't get it. People think just because you have a job which pays the bills and save money, everything is fine because there are lots of people who dream to get a job, so be thankful for what you have. I'm thankful... But it's not helping. I really want to do things more than what my job asks me to. The kid inside me is awake since I became adult.

Have you been in this condition or is it just me? Or is it too confusing? Could you please help me out. Thanks a lot. Sorry for serious post. I'm a java programmer by the way.

My biggest coding distraction are my imaginary friends

there's this club at my school, called STEM, and another called "science olympiad." both are pretty cringey, bad, or boring. science olympiad was just for the college credit. during the intro to the club, they said there was a coding section. "game on!" is what they dubbed it as, where basically you're timed to make a game in scratch. i'm fucking tired of it. why is scratch considered programming? don't get me wrong, i'll write an OS in PHP before i say code.org is better than scratch, but fuck it. its a fucking interpreted language that's interpreted by another interpreted language. i don't understand why this shit is still used. scratch isn't good. please codecademy or w3schools or just write in binary directly, but not scratch. my hand hurts from dragging and dropping, my eyes hurt from the light theme, my imaginary cat committed suicide after learning about scratch's mascot. fuck it. now onto stem club, fuck it too. not for being bad (well, kinda), but for not being more recognized. it should be above science olympiad, and other clubs because you actually have to think instead of just memorize. but alas, we still were offered the choice of scratch to program the robot. sigh. arduino much? i guess not. challenging much? nope. was i elected "leader"? with three of my friends out of the eight there, i could have been, but no. effort in this would be depressing.

What a horrible monday today was. Fuck-all worked. Missed deadline. Not much sleep. Heart is racing.

But hey, the horoscope in the daily toiletpaper press knows it all better, as usual, 100% IQ:

💫"You have finally found your center. Your body and soul are feeling great and your're in tune with yourself. You are enjoying it and would love to share your experiences with your loved one."💫

Where is my rocket launcher??? I have to kill a newspaper.

Apparently the waitress saw my 6 imaginary friends when i'm coding alone.

Sooo a coworker and I tonight were working on some software and somehow got side tracked on discussion regarding our thinking process, and how one of our other coworkers always things so strangely always defensive etc.. which then lead us to saying it would be nice if we could like see and feel how another persons brain is and how they draw conclusions and think..
this conversion immediately changed to the inner-monologue discussion.

And holy shit went go distracted for 4 hours tonight!

I have inner monologue, visual, auditory, symbolic and non symbolic abstract thinking in my mind, and it’s all happening at the same time, like a million miles a minute.

The other coworker has no inner monologue at all.

4 hours questioning each other trying to understand how the other one things then debating what we believe how the one perticular Coworker thinks. And then placing bets on what we think all the other coworkers are.

I’ve never had such a deep discussion on how my brain works nor how someone else thinks.

Like I was like joking but serious not in a bad way I’m not crazy my brain switches thinking depending on the situation I don’t have to. Try or think about it just occurs..

Like remembering things I’ll daisy chain and hop pictures, words and thoughts to bring back things but no effort it just occurs.
When a song is playing I can remember the last time I heard that song or part of the song I can feel how it was, I can see what I was doing what was happening in the world etc.
In the shower or driving I will have debates in my mind and play scenarios out in my mind on how a conversation or situation will go. I visually see and hear and feel the conversation that did or did not occur at that time. And I can jump to “playing” each person.

Or when a large decision is to be made or brainstorming an idea to me I like having the British parliament in a room, and debating the topic.

When people are talking I visually see what they are saying.

I thought EVERYONE was like this.. apparently not lol.

But this conversation did bring up a lot of realization of why I can quickly jump to conclusions or quickly move thru a conversation or concept but my coworker is lagging behind. Or having a hard time visualizing what I’m saying, thus me drawing it very fast and him/them saying how did you come up with that that quickly... ugh because in my mind I’ve already drew it up I’m just drawing what I see. Almost having to slow down and go back in time to explain something to them.

THEN we called a few of my “Star” interns haha and asked them, apparently they are all think the same way I do or atleast somewhat, which explains why some people I work i able to express ideas and continue thru a topic very quickly. While others I must slow down.

We need more of these discussions until now I had no idea there was “a different way people mentally process things” the entire conversation was very enlightening for the both of us, now I know what I must do differently and so does the other one.

But then we thought what caused this? Is this a learned trait from experience as a child? Or evaluation? Or just the deck of cards we are delt? Is this left hand people or right hand? I’m left hand and the two interns are left hand and they think the same, but the other coworker in the discussion was a right hander.. then we thought was this a result of imaginary friends as a young child? Was this a result of reading as a young child? Is one version better at math than the other.. music etc... is this a result of hyperactive brain? Drugs? Could drugs induce it? What does alcohol do to it...

Yeah we questioned all these things and more seriously went down the rabbit hole tonight... lmfao, tomorrow we will be surveying the rest of the team to see if we can draw any spurious informer conclusions and how accurate our bets were based on what we know personality wise of the other coworkers

SOOOOO thoughts???? Hahah

How many of y’all knew the other type existed? What type are you? And are you introverted or extroverted? Any rational relations we can connect to better explain this shit?